Things I Know

My therapist suggested that I write down some reference points of my worldview when I'm feeling well that I can look back at when I'm not doing so well.

Here are things that I know to be true to me when I'm not spiraling:

I've been happy in my life
I've been happy with my life
I think there's a purpose to life
I'm generally a competent person
I'm generally a good person
My cat is pretty awesome and worth living for alone
My parents are pretty awesome and worth living for alone
My person is pretty awesome and worth living for alone
I have things that I want to accomplish with my life
I can accomplish those things
I can make a difference with my life
I can make differences in my life
Skating makes me happy
Playing soccer makes me happy
Reading makes me happy
Learning is a worthwhile pursuit
I am better today than I was a year ago

What's the Point?

The hardest nights are the ones where I can't answer that question. Where I can't distinguish my thoughts from Anxiety's and Depression's.

The ones where I can't tell if I'm drowning or treading water nor which I actually want to do.

If I don't know where I'm going, how can I tell if I'm getting there?

If this is what life is, then is there any value in living it?

Are we actually good people?

Facebook makes it harder. I can't handle the sad news as it just shakes these questions to the forefront. Trump destroys more families. Hatred of people takes a front row spot. I want so desperately to be able to stand up and protest and demand action. Instead, I sit on the couch and cry and ask "what's the point?" I don't have faith in humanity. I don't have trust in myself. It doesn't seem like progress. It seems like vapid tv shows and fluff novels have been created and overproduced to pull us into complacency and into a sense that life has meaning if we just laugh enough.

My former therapist would point out that no emotion lasts forever. We are happy for some time; sad, angry and fearful for others. It's supposed to remind me that this feeling of absolute desolation doesn't last but on nights like these, it reminds me that even if I move past it once, it'll be back again.

So again I ask "what's the point?" If you can't stay happy forever, is it worth going through this in order to feel happy again for some time only to go through this again AND again AND AGAIN.

Are we assigning purpose to idle playthings in order to feel okay each morning? Is there a deeper reason why anyone should want to live beyond make friends, make money, do things?

When I can't answer these questions, I cry.

Conversations in My Brain

Me: I just want to sit on the couch all day.

Brain: You need coffee.

Me: I want to make coffee and sit on the couch all day.

Brain: Why don't you get laundry while the coffee is brewing?

Me: No

Brain: You don't like sitting down while you wait for coffee. Use the time to get your laundry.

Me: No

Brain: You like folding laundry too. You can do that after you get it from upstairs.

Me: Will you stop if I just get the laundry?

Brain: Yes

Me: Okay. I'll get it but I'm not folding it.

What It Means to Me to be Suicidal

Important note:
I'm getting the help I need to get me to an okay place mentally again. It's a long road though.

Trigger warning: Suicide Ideation, Depression, Mental Health,

So, as of late, there's not a day that goes by that I don't have at least one of the following thoughts:

"I wonder what it would feel like to slit my wrists"
"What if I swerve my car into a guardrail?"
"I don't really want to wake up tomorrow"
"Do you really think 'it gets better'?"

and many more related ones.

It's familiar to me at this point because a lot of these same thoughts were in my head about two and a half years ago. I was so scared that I'd impulsively kill myself that I hid the knives in my house, tried to avoid driving as much as possible and slept with wrist guards on to stop me from being able to just "make the cut".

I never tried to kill myself though. I never made a plan. I never made a decision to do it and had someone intervene before I could sort my shit out and with help, the thoughts decreased and eventually went away for a time.

At that point, I couldn't label myself as "suicidal" because I thought that meant that you had a plan and you were going to act on it and these thoughts that were entering my head weren't ones I wanted. I didn't identify with them. I worried about them. Of course, worrying about them meant I focused on them more and became freaked out about them (because if someone tells you not to think of a pink elephant, you're gonna think of a pink elephant). I felt like I couldn't talk about them though.

The outward silence about my inner thoughts had many causes. Mostly, I was scared that someone would want to lock me away or put me on suicide watch and admitting that I needed help was as bad as admitting defeat because it meant that this was something that I'd be dealing with for a long time and not just a weird one off situation. I felt like I didn't deserve to take away valuable resources from people who were "actually suicidal". I was worried if I talked about it, I'd be more likely to follow through.

That silence was not remotely helpful. It left me freaking out and isolating myself from others in case I accidentally blurted out my thoughts. It didn't mean the thoughts went away. It didn't mean that I didn't need help. It didn't mean that I was somehow overcoming this illness on my own.

I went to a suicide prevention workshop called "safeTALK" last week run by NAMI. It was 3 hours and completely free but reminded me of all the above and how hard it was to get help. I think it was one of the best things I did last week and strongly encourage other folks to check it out. Below is a quick summary of what I think was most important to me from those three hours.

The fact is, one in twenty people think about suicide in a two week period.  If you're on a sports team, there's a high likelihood that someone else on your team has thought about suicide at least once in the past two weeks. Very rarely are these people at the point where they've made a decision and come up with a plan BUT getting help before that happens is the BEST time to get help. The majority of people who decide to die by suicide act on that decision within ONE DAY of making it. Some people act in as few as five minutes after deciding.

We need to talk more about what it means to be suicidal. We need to make it okay for someone to say they have thoughts of killing themself without us going into crisis mode. We need to learn how to get these people help that feels right to them because help is far easier to obtain when thoughts are just thoughts than after they are a decision and we need to find ways to confirm that thoughts of suicide are serious and important and worth talking about and getting help for no matter "how intent" the person is on killing themself. We need to stop the stigma and treat mental health the same as physical health because being mentally ill can kill you.

Things I've Lost Due to Depression

1) A Normal Sleep Schedule

2) Confidence

3) Joy

4) Happiness

5) My Sense of Humor

6) Mondays

7) The Ability to Open my Computer Without Psyching Myself Up for It

8) My Faith in Humanity

9) Excitement

Things Keeping Me Up At Night

Really it's a list of questions more than anything else but as it's 4am my time, you can see that these things are currently interfering with my sleep patterns.

1) How did we end up with "feminism" as the default for talking about social justice?

Other oppressions/privileged groups that we want to talk about get defined negatively ("racism" "homophobia" "ableism" "cis-sexism" "heteronormativity" to name a few). We don't have words common to most media vernacular to talk about the beliefs, practices and procedures for combating them ("critical theory" and "critical race studies" come to mind but I haven't seen them used outside of academia really).

With, what I hope, is an actual turn towards intersectionality, why is social justice action still focused (at least linguistically) on gender with the phrase becoming "intersectional feminism" or variants thereof? Along with that, why is "patriarchy" so prevalent while "kyriarchy" is not and I'm not aware of single-word terms that focus foremost on race or class.

In terms of what my limited knowledge of history regarding struggles of oppressed people (both in terms of massive systemic oppression and revolutions for rights) suggests, it's not that gender came first. How did we end up gender-centric and should we try to change our language way beyond adding "intersectional" in front of "feminism"?

2) Why are we acting like facts matter again? What can we do otherwise?

I spent admittedly too long reading comments on snopes articles and media posts about the turnout for Trump's inauguration and the press conference held today. If there's one thing we should have learned from the bold faced lying from Trump and his campaign and subsequent voting for Trump it's that arguing facts don't matter when trying to convince someone who is diametrically opposed or even slightly beyond on the fence (arguably there is a whole world of social psych that also could have told you this before then). So, how do we actually deal with a world where facts don't matter to POTUS and to his supporters? I mean, initially including facts is helpful for fence sitters and people who already have anti-Trump beliefs but they don't actually work in terms of convincing others (nor educating perhaps?). So, how do we interact politically with people we disagree with when realizing that facts and rationality aren't on the table (none of us are perfectly rational)? How must politics (and economics and traffic laws and a lot of other things) change when we stop with the idealization that humans are rational actors in this world?

3) How do you convince people that rights are rights?

There was an article by Slate  that looked at what Trump supporters thought of the Women's March and one of the quotes is from Tate, from Georgia: “I just don’t understand why they are marching. I don’t know what rights they are losing or what’s being threatened.”

And that one in particular I found interesting because I think it in a simple way gets at a common divide. It doesn't have to be that Tate doesn't know that the ACA is being gutted, Trump is emboldening police forces across the country that already are doing massive amounts of violence to persons of colour and queer folk are fearing for their marriages and their ability to just go pee in public without confrontation. It can honestly be read as Tate doesn't think those things are related to people's rights.

So how do you convince people that health care or the ability to get married or live not in constant fear of the police are in fact rights that everyone should have (and perhaps the right to own a gun shouldn't be or at least shouldn't be quite so unlimited)? I've studied theories of rights and what various scholars say is a right and what isn't a right and how to determine them but it doesn't actually answer the question of how to convince people and looking at the question above, how do you do it without relying on people believing rational arguments and without relying on facts? Convincing people matters as long as we live in democracies where others do get to vote on the folks who decide whether I have a right or not (or appoint people to a court that decides or myriad other ways things come back to the electorate). Even if Tate understands some amount of the privilege they possess, if that doesn't tie back into rights in some way, does that matter?

4) This one is a bit different from the rest but I've spent awhile trying to find an article I read from the Feminist Blog-O-Sphere some time since 2010 about how women (according to the author all women but I'd say it more so applies to white women) are allowed and encourage a little bit of masculinity. The examples I remember included barbequing and Jodi Picoult and the phrase, I think, was something food related "a snack of masculinitiy" "a bite of..." etc. How do I find this article again?

Part of me wonders if the marches and protests fall into this idea. It's totally fine for (white) women to have a moment of being loud and saying "no, this isn't okay" as long as nothing gets damaged and then they fall back into complacency (and of course support cis-sexist understandings of womanhood in their protesting). I'd really like to re-read the article but I cannot find it and have no clue when it was published (most likely 2010 or 2011 but not definitely) nor where it was published (I was reading around 80 plus sites daily then so looking in bookmarks and favorites doesn't help either).

Finally, as a thank you for making it to the bottom of this post. Enjoy this drawing from Emm, not Emma

Things that Bother Me about the World We Inhabit

In no way is this list exhaustive. I've been downhearted, angry, in complete disbelief about a lot of the following and because of this combo I really have a hard time figuring out how to make them better. Sometimes systems just seem too big and people too invested to actually make noticeable improvements.

1. The relation between health and beauty
Why do we think that these two things go in tandem? Seriously, beauty products are not health products nor are beauty treatments health treatments. Let's let people be people and choose how they want to express themselves without attaching moral health trolling to those choices.

2. Valuing money over lives
At the base of it, money is paper or bits of code that WE assign value to. It doesn't have value outside of the systems which we create and reinforce and continue. Lives do. How have we set up a system where it's impossible to value something that is intrinsically valuable over something that is artificially/instrumentally valuable?

3. Nationalism
This goes ALL ways. Everyone who feels like they have to stay in a nation to try and make it better. Everyone who wants to re-take a nation to bring back "the good old days". Again, nations have no meaning outside of what we give them. I think I wish we all had open border policies across the world. I mean, I warrant no extra special treatment because I came out of my mother's womb at a particular location in the world nor because my mom lived within an artificial human made set of boundaries for a certain number of years. Why do I get more things than someone not born in the US or Canada? Why do I have more of an obligation to those countries? All of it strikes me as a nationalism that I'm not okay with it and creates divisiveness over actually helping PEOPLE.

4. Competition vs Collaboration
So we stack capitalism as if competition generates the best results but then also have this idea that you can do more and be better with collaboration (as long as it's internal to a corporation or a sports team). The way we've set up capitalist/corporate systems, we give being competitive (to the point of generating a monopoly if possible and of course preferring money to lives see above) an edge over anything that's collaborative or works as a co-op. Why have we biased everything in favor of adversarial approaches? The idea that competition makes things better is not generally more supported than the idea that collaboration does but generates a lot more collateral damage along the way.

5. Humans are not rational
We know we aren't. We know a billion different ways that we aren't. Can we stop idealizing this idea of rationality and building policies and such that support it as they do real damage to people? Marketing would not be the multi-billion dollar business it is if we were rational. Social psychology would not have a list of over a 100 biases if we were. Also, given that "rationality" is a construct which tends to support status quo ideas, it has real and harmful effects on marginalized groups both in dismissing them, their experiences and arguments as irrational and reinforcing arguments that support the continued oppression of people.

Finally, why do we value rationality to extremes anyways? I remember when my grandmother was ill and senile (and dying no matter what medical interventions happened), doctors would do things against her will because she was irrational. The fact she was irrational didn't lessen her duress about it at all. The harm done to her was if anything greater than if she was rational. Why does it matter that she was making irrational choices, they were choices that felt good to her?

6. Men are emotional
I don't mean in the they can be happy, sad, etc sense. I mean that we, as a society, value men getting angry. They get angry often and are righteous about it and we are okay with this. Why did we somehow separate anger from other emotions and declare it rational? Also, why do we not expect and teach men to control their anger (which expressions of can get incredibly harmful to others in ways that happiness or sadness generally don't) the way we expect and teach mean to show no other emotions?

The doubling harmful part of this is if women are angry about things that don't typically anger men, women are being emotional and irrational but men don't face the same standard of when their anger is rational or reasonable.

7. Individualism, Intentions, Blame and Merit
In this, I really mean when we think individuals have a responsibility to act differently. We (more so in the States than other places I've lived) have this idea that an individual should only be required to change their behaviour if their behaviour was the sole and immediate cause of a problem. So if it's not directly your fault that someone else doesn't have the ability to feed themselves or avoid being shot by police, there is no obligation on you to act differently.

And then, we examine what makes something your fault, we default to examining what your intentions were. I really do not understand how we improve systemic issues without all taking ownership of the fact that we live in them. I didn't do anything to get the rights of a US citizen or the privileges of being white but that's exactly part of why they are problematic.

Systemic oppression is going to reinforce itself across multiple institutions and spheres of influence. Of course one action doesn't make it go away, it's a multi-faceted problem. However, no counteraction means we see the status quo strengthening. We have obligations to make other people's lives better even when we didn't do anything directly to create the system because not doing so does make their lives worse. It cannot be about individual's intentions or blame but about collaboration and an onus on everyone to make the world even slightly more kind to more people.

This whole idea of you can have a one to one correlation between an individual's actions and their responsibilities for redress can only be supported as fair and just if we already live in a merit based society (even them I'm not convinced it works well).